If you are at all interested in youth or collegiate athletics, or have a child who might someday be so inclined, you ought to read this article on injuries in girls soccer. The author notes that women tend to be much more injury prone than men who play the same sports. She attributes this to many factors, including typical body shapes, strength, and gait among others. It’s an interesting article on young women, but the take home is applicable to all young athletes: coaches and parents approach youth athletics all wrong, and our kids pay the price for our ignorance. Here are a few examples, drawn from that article and expanded with my own experience.

Let’s start with specialization. Children and adolescents ought to be encouraged to participate in many different sporting activities–and not just so that they know what they are missing. Kids, like all of us, need to work out all year round in order to stay in shape; but repeating the same physical activities all the time, day in and day out, can lead to excessive stress on those joints and muscle groups. We’re better off mixing up our workouts periodically; we’ll be healthier in the long-run and have less chance of suffering an injury or chronic pain. Now, any adult that has ever seen a personal trainer knows this–and yet if their child is an elite soccer, baseball, tennis, or volleyball player there is a descent chance that she plays that sport virtually year round and to the exclusion of others. Many coaches actually encourage their best players to give up other sports, in an ignorant belief that “there is no off-season” or that “the risk of injury over there is just too great”.

Scheduling is another problem. Games are much more fun than practice, it’s true. But they are also harder on our bodies and our minds. We push ourselves (both physically and mentally) in competition in ways that we never push ourselves in practice–especially in tournaments where failure means “elimination”. Competitions ought to be routinized (once a week, twice a week, etc.) and scheduled so that players have plenty of time to rest and recover before the next one. In this respect, football has an advantage over many other sports; in high school it would take me several days after a game before I could do any relatively minor activity, and so there would never be any temptation to schedule more than one game a week. But in many other sports, we ask kids to go out and compete every day. Baseball and soccer are probably the worst in that respect; even fifteen years ago, I knew of kids who would play in a baseball or soccer tournament (where a tournament could mean as many as six games) almost every weekend from March through October. My understanding is that this has just gotten worse. That kind of excessive competition is extremely unhealthy.

Finally, in the rush to compete training tends to take a back seat. We teach kids how to swing, throw, and kick. But we almost never teach them how to run, jump, or even stand. And yes, that matters a lot. A small change in gait can significantly reduce the chances of a knee or ankle injury. Understanding how to land or fall can lead to fewer broken bones and concussions. Balance, strength, and flexibility are extremely important in virtually all sports, and yet many parents and coaches fail to encourage one or more of those things. My own experience is that this is significantly worse among women’s sports (although that may only be my limited experience). For instance, I spent a lot of time in our high school’s weight room, and yet there were only a small handful of girls who ever spent any significant time in there at all, especially in their primary sport’s off-season. And yet a good strength-training program can significantly reduce the risk of knee and back injuries.

Injuries will always happen, of course. But we can do a lot to lower their frequency. And that’s good for everybody. Bad knees make for bad athletic careers–and after six knee injuries and three surgeries I know what I’m talking about there. At the end of the day, our kids will be happier and healthier soccer and baseball players if they are also strong, flexible, and well-rounded athletes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Baseball, Football, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.